How a Parasitic Worm Forces Praying Mantises to Drown By themselves

By Darren Incorvaia

For a praying mantis, taking in the erroneous insect can be a a person-way ticket to a watery grave. Some of its normal bug prey have horsehair worms, Chordodes fukuii, which mature in a mantid’s gut—and in some way manipulate the mantid into diving into the nearest physique of h2o. The spaghettilike worms then wriggle cost-free of their drowned host and reproduce. Aquatic insects try to eat the worms’ offspring and are then consumed by other mantids, and the cycle repeats.

Now researchers may possibly have discovered how the parasite pulls off its deadly trick: it looks to have advanced to use genes that its species after “stole” from the mantids on their own, enabling the worm to make proteins that influence the mantids’ anxious procedure. If confirmed, these results, revealed just lately in Present Biology, would be the most substantial documented situation of gene transfer amongst animal species.

Mantids contaminated with C. fukuii come to be attracted to light, like the shiny surface of water. This conduct is thought to arise from protein-stage changes in each the parasite and the host’s mind, claims senior author Takuya Sato, a biologist at Japan’s Kobe University. Because genes encode the instructions to construct these proteins, Sato and his colleagues established out to take a look at how the two species’ gene exercise changed in the course of the program of a horsehair worm infection.

The workforce found that a whopping 1,420 of the parasite’s genes resembled those of their hosts and that these genes were most energetic when the parasite was pulling the host’s strings.

Genes can transfer from one particular dwelling organism to a further in a system known as horizontal gene transfer, which is common in microbes but uncommon in between animals. “That would be very amazing—to have thousands of genes acquired by horizontal gene transfer from the host to parasites,” says Etienne Danchin, a biologist at France’s Sophia Agrobiotech Institute, who was not included with the analysis. “But I feel they will need to verify this claim,” he says, since the scientists haven’t nevertheless situated these probably stolen genes in the worm’s genome. The new research verified only that they ended up present in the parasite’s tissue samples, and it is nonetheless doable that some of these genes had been just contamination from the mantid, Danchin suggests.

“We should reserve judgment on the position and extent of horizontal gene transfer right up until a whole genome sequence is accessible that confirms that the transcripts are properly attributed to the mantid and the worm,” states Julie Dunning Hotopp, a microbiologist at the University of Maryland Baltimore, who was not associated with the analyze.

Sato programs to verify the parasites’ genome subsequent. “The system of horizontal gene transfer in C. fukuii is continue to a enormous mystery,” he claims. “By investigating genomes of C. fukuii and its mantid host,” he hopes to get nearer to unraveling it.